Part III - Chapter 13

1. Do you agree that the people who use a process should decide what needs improvement? Discuss why or why not.

• I do believe that the people who use the process should decide what needs improvement. The best software applications are the ones that understand the role the software takes in the organization. When the software is written to flow with the process of the operation then it becomes part of the system and has a smooth flow. It becomes intuitive to use and operate. Imagine the software that is written based upon management’s interpretation of the process. The result usually ends in a dismal failure. Management truly doesn’t understand the complexity of the process to be a useful source of information. So the best people to suggest improvement would be the people that use the system.

2. What steps would you take to improve the risk management practice on your project?

• I would develop a survey that tries to capture the current practice and have participants rate each practice on a 1-5 scale. I would also have them rate each item for performance and importance. This data can be imported to a spread sheet to produce visual representations (graphs and charts) to identify areas of improvement. It would also help to ask open ended questions to get people’s opinions on strengths and weakness of the current process.

3. List three reasons for using a structured appraisal method to assess risk management practices.

• After you enter survey responses into a spreadsheet, you can you can automatically generate a graph of strengths, weaknesses, and areas of improvement. Ant it is quantitative: people’s perceptions translate into objective numbers that measure risk management practices. You can easily track progress by applying the survey periodically.

4. How could a person’s job category be used to analyze risk practices survey? In what way would comparisons of results by job category serve as a check and balance on the findings?

• The survey is given to all those with responsibility for risk management. Anyone who has used a project charge number can be considered a candidate survey participant. The survey includes categories for all possible roles, to ensure adequate project representation. Risk practices survey participants are a mix of management and technical personnel. Survey results are the collective knowledge and experience of the project team, organization management, and the customer.

5. You are a process consultant hired to assess an organization’s risk management capability. What could you do to ensure the integrity of the data from a risk practices survey?

• By developing a quantitative process improvement survey that yields objective measurements through statistical analysis of subject perceptions. The risk practices survey requires survey participants to identify their perceptions of the performance and importance of risk management practices. Performance is how well the practice is completed. Importance is how significant the practice is.

6. Discuss the value of normalizing risk practices survey data?

• To analyze the risk practices survey results, enter responses into a spreadsheet that you can use to graph the survey data. Survey responses from 0 to 4 provide an ordinal ranking, but this does not measure the distance between the data points. To normalize the data, scale the data to fit a normal distribution. Map the ordinal scale 0 to 4 to fit a standard normal curve with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. Count the total number of responses for each response (from 0 to 4) and divide by the total number of responses to determine the percentage for each slice. Substitute these adjusted scores for the raw scores in subsequent analysis. By normalizing the data, you enable metrics and statistical comparisons.

7. You are a process group member responsible for improving risk management. The quantitative baseline of risk management practices shows that performance lags importance by at least a point. What does this tell you about the need for improvement?

• Plotting relative importance versus performance and the mean importance and performance provides four quadrants that categorize risk management practices. The quadrants show relative strengths and weaknesses and may be used to identify areas for improvement. Importance is the key to performance because we prioritize activity based on importance. The consequence of improperly valuing importance is the performance will likely suffer in proportion. The gap between performance and importance shows the need for risk management practices.

8. You are a member of a process action team responsible for developing an improvement plan for risk management practices. Both performance and importance of risk management practices are consistently low. What is your strategy for improvement?

• In this case you will have to look at what practices are the lowest scoring. By prioritizing the list from lowest to highest you can begin to see what areas are really lacking. The next step is to look at the plan and try to find the short comings of the practice. For example, let’s say that the practice “Risks are prioritized” has the lowest performance and importance. That tells me that while we are making priorities we are not following them or making them clear. Next, look at how the area is worked. Look at the last project and see how things were prioritized and then see how the priorities were followed. Try and find the cause of the priority problem and see if you can establish a policy to address the issue.

• The problem can stem from management wanting different things accomplished then the project manager. So they influence one of the developers to shift a priority to meet their goals. While the manipulation may seem insignificant to management and go unnoticed by the project manager, the developer could feel caught in the middle and feel that the priorities outlined in the project have no meaning.

• At this point you can bring this issue to management and get their support in discouraging these practices. By implementing this change you can improve your performance and importance scores and bring the risk management practice back in line again.

9. Explain how you would develop a realistic improvement plan. What constraints could cause you to adjust the plan?

• Once the plan is defined and responsibility is assigned by management, the next step is to identify key personnel for implementation. The key personnel should be involved in the improvements to promote buy-in from peers. The first step is to gather all of the key players and discuss the improvements. If they involve policy changes then discuss them in the group forum so everyone is aware of the changes. After these preliminary things are done, release each of the key personnel into their areas to implement the specific changes. They should brief all personnel in the area and give the implementation manager daily updates. If they meet resistance the implementation manager should be the one to resolve the issue. Once all of the changes are implemented, brief management that the implementation is complete and go over highlights of the process.

10. How can you determine if a plan is failing? What would you do if your plan failed?

• Part of the implementation should be follow-up to see if the new plan is working. If it seems to be continuing on the same path as before, or another bad path, that would be the time to adjust the new plan. If this is not possible the issue must be addressed and a new plan needs to be started. Use this opportunity get involved in the process as it is happening so the issues can be addressed directly. To prevent a total failure the implementation manager needs to be directly involved in the improvement process to ensure its success. The ultimate goal would be to not let the plan fail.

• In the inevitability that the plan does fail, it needs to be looked at to see why it failed. There may be a case that this process will not work in the context that it was started in and that it needs to be removed completely. This may very well be the case. If this happens then you must come up with a new plan, based upon the failures, that will meet the needs of the process to get it up and running.